Owen Luder sketched the concept on a train back to London. A multi-storey car park and shopping centre for Gateshead town centre, raw concrete cantilevered over a rooftop deck with views across the Tyne. Trinity Square opened in 1969. Two years later, Michael Caine threw a man from that rooftop in Get Carter. Four decades on, the building was rubble. Souvenir fragments were sold in commemorative tins.

Luder said demolishing it would mean Gateshead was "losing its front teeth." He was not wrong about the absence. What replaced Trinity Square was a Tesco-backed retail development that was promptly nominated for the Carbuncle Cup, an annual award for the worst new building in Britain.

Portsmouth went first. The Tricorn Centre, designed by Rodney Gordon under Luder's partnership, opened in 1966. A brutalist shopping-and-parking hybrid that Reyner Banham included in Megastructures. Prince Charles called it "a mildewed lump of elephant droppings." It came down in March 2004. The site is now a surface car park. All that ambition, replaced by tarmac at grade level.

"In the sixties my buildings were awarded," Luder said. "In the seventies they were applauded, in the eighties they were questioned, in the nineties they were ridiculed, and when we get through to 2000 the ones I like most are the ones that have been demolished."

Multi-storey car parks sit in a dead zone between architecture and infrastructure. Functional enough to resist heritage sentiment. Too ugly for conservation areas. Permanently tethered to the car at exactly the moment British planning decided the car was the problem. Brutalist housing gets campaigns. Brutalist leisure centres get heritage listings. Car parks get demolished.

Welbeck Street, off Marylebone High Street, had a precast concrete facade of repeating diamond shapes that Sam Jacob called part of "a small gang, a batch of buildings produced in a small window when car parks were treated as civic monuments." Michael Blampied designed it in 1970. Historic England assessed it for listing in 2015 and refused. The facade was "striking" but the ground floor was weak, the Pop Art influence "derivative and a relatively late example." It came down for a hotel in 2019. The assessment read like a rejection letter for a building that had applied for the wrong job.

Preston Bus Station survived. BDP completed it in 1969 with 1,100 parking spaces above the bus concourse, horizontal concrete fins running the full length like the gills of something amphibious. Preston Council wanted it gone. The Twentieth Century Society fought for fifteen years, through two failed listing applications, before Grade II status arrived in September 2013. A £23 million refurbishment followed.

Preston had a civic function underneath the parking. Buses. Public transport. Something that didn't depend on private car ownership for its justification. The Tricorn and Trinity Square had shops, but the parking was the dominant gesture, the thing that shaped the skyline. When the shops died, the car park had outlived the world that made sense of it and couldn't find a second life. You can't repurpose a seven-level car park as a defibrillator station.

Luder died in October 2021 at ninety-three. He spent his last decades watching his most significant buildings pulled down and their replacements go wrong. Gateshead replaced brutalist teeth with a retail denture. Portsmouth replaced ambition with asphalt. Welbeck Street replaced geometry with a hotel nobody will remember.

The buildings that survived found a second reason to exist. The ones that didn't are aggregate now.

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